Chapter 26: Chapter 26: Old friends.

I released the seals on the space suit to allow me to breathe again. Zombie howls still sounded, but they were behind me and fading. In the deep dark and without being able to hear me, the horde quickly lost interest.

The problem with the suit was that I wasn’t getting any of the oxygen that the suit diagnostics said was there. Something was wrong with the air supply, but what exactly it was I could not tell.

What I did know was that there was no way I could hold my breath for long enough to make it to another airlock, even if I did manage to get outside. That meant that I had to find another way.

The food service elevator was my first choice. There was a horde that seemed to nest in the bottom of the maintenance shafts, so that was a no-go. And the elevators were always a bad idea. Sounds echoed strangely in them the few times I had been near one since the collapse. One howl and any horde within two levels would be on my trail.

Once I reached the bulkhead I stopped, reorienting myself to head for the cafeteria and the elevator in the back. I tried to keep far enough from the ceiling to avoid the sleepers there. Some of them might be alive enough to howl. It was also important to stay far enough away from the paths between the warehouses, because there were still many individual zombies there, too.

The “low light” vision mode from the suit helmet was good enough in near pitch darkness that avoiding the few sleepers I encountered on my path easy enough. But that was the end of the good news. I could faintly hear the familiar tune of the Yakitori Dok Dok jingle coming from the speakers in the cafeteria over the grumbling zombies.

I’d heard it before when zombies were annoyed by something that wasn’t prey. At least, that is how I interpreted the action. It was halfway between a weak growl and a mumble. The horde at the cafeteria was at least several hundred strong.

This meant all the options I had identified so far were bad options. If a horde ever managed to box me in they would tear me apart in minutes at best. Maybe there was an airlock that had miraculously escaped notice and had a working space suit?

It became apparent to me that my musing had taken too long when a zombie brushed by me on its way to the cafeteria. Somehow sensing me inside the space suit, it howled as it spun, swiping its claws in my direction as it continued on its previous trajectory.

Of course that attracted the attention of the horde. It was time to run away again.

I pushed off the roof of the warehouse for the ceiling again. Even as I reached the debris choked mass of pipes and conduits other zombies started impacting around me, turning and howling. Just how they were sensing me in the dark made me wonder as I used the available hand and footholds like a jungle gym.

Was it some sort of echolocation? I still had not been able to perform any proper testing and study on the zombies, but there did not appear to be any visible physical mutations that could point to such a drastic adaptation. Maybe they just somehow were able to discern the slight noises that my moving around made, from rustling of suit fabric to the sound that I made bouncing off the trash piles.

Two zombies landed practically on top of me as I was swinging around a convenient pipe to change direction. The one that hit my chest I drained as quickly as I could. The other managed to bite down on my left knee. The same damned leg that kept getting bit, bruised, and stabbed.

Only this time it didn’t hurt at all. The zombie just ended up gnawing on the hardened plates that covered my legs. After realizing that I was just hanging there with a puzzled look on my face and a zombie gnawing at my leg like the world’s most disgusting puppy I drained that one, too.

Doing so produced another spark of light, but in the darkness it stood out like a beacon. Every zombie around seemed to howl at once.

I only made it another twenty feet before another zombie tackled me. It hit so hard that it knocked us both off the ceiling. Almost instantly it latched onto the back of my helmet and started to gnaw as I reached up to grab it. I only managed to slap it before it shifted, causing the two of us to spin.

That meant that I was on the bottom when we skipped across the warehouse roof. Once again the bulky space suit saved me by cushioning the impact so that it only mostly knocked the breathe out of me. The zombie was less affected. It clung on with one clawed hand.

Before it could continue trying to chew its way through my helmet we hit a stack of heavy cargo crates. The implant zombie fell free and I could suddenly breathe again. This time I was ready when it attacked and managed to grab it by the arm.

An instant later we were struck by an incoming zombie that sent us crashing into the deck. Make that two zombies.

I started to drain the implant zombie and one of the two that hit us at the same time. Immediately I felt pain feeding back through my hand and up my arm. Then the sneaky bastard wrenched itself away and I was left with just two flesh eating monsters to deal with.

To start with, rather. More were closing in, and I stabbed one while the other turned to greasy ash. Turns out that sometimes it was quicker to stab them than drain them.

I kicked off the corpses to get myself moving. There was no sign of the implant zombie. It was probably hiding out so it could ambush me again. It wouldn’t need to do that if the horde caught me, though.

Seeing the horde moving towards me through so much open space was slightly surreal. It looked like a slowly shifting blob of creatures that seemed to lurch forward as individual zombies awkwardly pushed off each other.

It was when they were in more enclosed spaces in sufficient numbers that they suddenly seemed faster and more coordinated. Or in gravity.

The main horde wasn’t my only issue, though. There were other zombies that had wandered away at some point. These popped up at random intervals, sometimes floating slowly through the air until they could reach a hard surface, then launching themselves in my general direction with all the strength they could muster.

One such wanderer managed to tackle me from behind. This sent us both rocketing into the ceiling.

Only this time I really went into the ceiling as the zombie was knocked away. A maintenance hatch had been left open, and my left leg went inside as I struck the hatch itself, bouncing off and causing plate of metal to rebound with a loud bang. I might as well have been ringing a dinner bell for every infected in the entire warehouse.

Zombie hunting howls seemed to echo from every direction. I took a chance on the small maintenance area and shut the hatch, ducking in and locking myself inside. As soon as I did something hit the hatch from the outside and nearly made it bounce back open again.

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It wasn’t quite as foolish a risk as it might have looked like initially. I wasn’t just in some closet for stashing equipment and spare parts. There was a tunnel that led deeper into the station above me.

It would take time for the zombies to work their way through the hatch and the clock was already ticking. I started climbing.

The tunnel was a tight squeeze for my bulky space suit. Various unknown mechanisms intruded onto the space frequently. I could still hear the zombies somewhere behind me. It sounded like they’d made a hole in the hatch panel at least.

After shoving my way into a slightly more open space it became clear that I would have to ditch the suit to keep going. The tunnels ahead were barely lit, but they looked even smaller than the ones I’d already climbed through.

Getting out of the space suit meant awkwardly twisting around in the still small space. I nearly got stuck with one arm out of the suit but managed to wedge my legs into an opening in order to let me bend more fully so I could get my head and other arm loose.

All the tunnels looked pretty much the same to me, so I picked one at random. Without the light enhancing vision of my suit helmet it was dark, but there were a few lights to guide the way.

The tunnel I was in twisted and turned around bits of heavy machinery. There were pressurized ventilation shafts, water and sewer pipes, power and plasma conduits, and other things I couldn’t even guess at all packed together around me.

The more I learned about Walker, the more surprised I was that it had lasted this long. The space station was impossibly complex. Going without maintenance for so long had to have a deleterious effect on its continued operation, yet it still had done so.

The revelation of the un-maintained escape pods and emergency procedures did not fill me with confidence about how well other parts of the station were maintained. But perhaps the essential functions like power, air, and water weren’t that compromised before the collapse.

One could hope, anyway.

The tunnel system seemed endless. It branched off in different directions as I went, but I kept to the one I thought of as the “main” branch. I hadn’t heard a zombie howl for quite some time, which meant that the horde had finally lost interest.

That didn’t mean that I was safe, though.

I found the first zombie by accident. Rather, it found me. There were no initial indications of zombie activity. No piles of trash, no floating debris. Wedged into a niche, it lunged out at me with a hoarse sounding howl. This was the first zombie I’d heard that sounded, well, sick. Usually the sounds they made were either annoyed grumbled or hunting howls or screams.

Its lunge was awkward and slow enough that I managed to respond in time. My nanite colony was starting to feel slightly bloated again as I caught it by the head and started to drain it. Only it took longer this time to drain it than usual. The zombie pawed at me weakly and I caught its twig like arms in my other hand, keeping them away from my throat.

Usually it only took a few seconds at most to force my nanites into the zombie before they would come back to me after they stole every last bit of energy. This time though, I could feel a sort of resistance building up. My nanites were pushing through, but it was like wading through thick mud.

I could feel myself tiring as the zombie also slowed to a stop, no longer fighting me even as weakly as it had. My hand began to feel warm, then hot and the heat spread up my arm and into my chest. All of a sudden, the resistance collapsed and my nanites came rushing back.

Only this time, there was far, far more of them than I’d ever held at once.

Nanite bloat so intense it felt like they would burst from my eyeballs. I started to sweat. The pain that I hadn’t been feeling since I’d awoken came back, slowly at first, but in increasing waves.

I immediately ate a meal bar from my stash. Ever since I found the ones on the ship I vowed to never be without immediate food again if I could help it. The pain eased somewhat as I finished the first one. I ate another one as I left the strange corpse behind and continued up the tunnel.

This made another new kind of zombie. I could understand the zombies with implants having abilities granted them by the technology grafted onto their very bodies. But so far the giant zombie and now this one, packed to bursting with nanites, that was different.

The drain did not bring a mild sense of euphoria this time, as it had in the past. Or if it did, that feeling was completely overridden by the pressure, pain, and queasiness of nanite bloat. I felt like sprinting to burn off all the energy, but at the same time did not want to move lest I hurt myself.

Even now I could be. It was hard to tell. I tried to keep an eye out for more ambushers, but kept getting distracted. I could feel the nanites within me shifting. It felt like parasites moving about under my skin. Which nanites were, in a way, but generally beneficial ones. Most of the time.

The next zombie I found was already dead. Head smashed in, blocking my view of the rest of the tunnel ahead. I moved around it carefully but there was nothing else to see. Just more tunnel. At some point in the past someone had killed it.

What bothered me was that it hadn’t been chewed on. The zombie that I had drained before was weak, but it hadn’t been starved. There was no food to be found in the maintenance tunnels. Zombies needed to eat. They preferred to eat humans. If not humans, other animals would do. Absent that, they’d eat human consumables. And failing that, carrion would do. Even other zombies.

But this one had not been fed upon.

The thought distracted me from my nanite bloat for a time, but it didn’t last. I needed to purge these nanites, and soon. The power section would have what I needed, or something at least close enough.

It had to.

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